OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Energy-Aware, Collision-Free Information Gathering for Heterogeneous Robot Teams
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2023
Year: 2023

This paper considers the problem of safely coordinating a team of sensor-equipped robots to reduce uncertainty about a dynamical process, where the objective trades off information gain and energy cost. Optimizing this trade-off is desirable, but leads to a non-monotone objective function in the set of robot trajectories. Therefore, common multi-robot planners based on coordinate descent lose their performance guarantees. Furthermore, methods that handle non-monotonicity lose their performance guarantees when subject to inter-robot collision avoidance constraints. As it is desirable to retain both the performance guarantee and safety guarantee, this work proposes a hierarchical approach with a distributed planner that uses local search with a worst-case performance guarantees and a decentralized controller based on control barrier functions that ensures safety and encourages timely arrival at sensing locations. Via extensive simulations, hardware-in-the-loop tests and hardware experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves a better trade-off between sensing and energy cost than coordinate-descent-based algorithms.
GraphMFT: A Graph Network based Multimodal Fusion Technique for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Venue: arXiv cs.MM 2023
Year: 2023

Multimodal machine learning is an emerging area of research, which has received a great deal of scholarly attention in recent years. Up to now, there are few studies on multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC). Since Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) possess the powerful capacity of relational modeling, they have an inherent advantage in the field of multimodal learning. GNNs leverage the graph constructed from multimodal data to perform intra- and inter-modal information interaction, which effectively facilitates the integration and complementation of multimodal data. In this work, we propose a novel Graph network based Multimodal Fusion Technique (GraphMFT) for emotion recognition in conversation. Multimodal data can be modeled as a graph, where each data object is regarded as a node, and both intra- and inter-modal dependencies existing between data objects can be regarded as edges. GraphMFT utilizes multiple improved graph attention networks to capture intra-modal contextual information and inter-modal complementary information. In addition, the proposed GraphMFT attempts to address the challenges of existing graph-based multimodal conversational emotion recognition models such as MMGCN. Empirical results on two public multimodal datasets reveal that our model outperforms the State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) approaches with the accuracy of 67.90% and 61.30%.
The Search and Rescue Game on a Cycle
Venue: arXiv cs.DS 2023
Year: 2023

We consider a search and rescue game introduced recently by the first author. An immobile target or targets (for example, injured hikers) are hidden on a graph. The terrain is assumed to dangerous, so that when any given vertex of the graph is searched, there is a certain probability that the search will come to an end, otherwise with the complementary {\em success probability} the search can continue. A Searcher searches the graph with the aim of finding all the targets with maximum probability. Here, we focus on the game in the case that the graph is a cycle. In the case that there is only one target, we solve the game for equal success probabilities, and for a class of games with unequal success probabilities. For multiple targets and equal success probabilities, we give a solution for an adaptive Searcher and a solution in a special case for a non-adaptive Searcher. We also consider a continuous version of the model, giving a full solution for an adaptive Searcher and approximately optimal solutions in the non-adaptive case.
Aggretriever: A Simple Approach to Aggregate Textual Representations for Robust Dense Passage Retrieval
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Pre-trained language models have been successful in many knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, recent work has shown that models such as BERT are not ``structurally ready'' to aggregate textual information into a [CLS] vector for dense passage retrieval (DPR). This ``lack of readiness'' results from the gap between language model pre-training and DPR fine-tuning. Previous solutions call for computationally expensive techniques such as hard negative mining, cross-encoder distillation, and further pre-training to learn a robust DPR model. In this work, we instead propose to fully exploit knowledge in a pre-trained language model for DPR by aggregating the contextualized token embeddings into a dense vector, which we call agg*. By concatenating vectors from the [CLS] token and agg*, our Aggretriever model substantially improves the effectiveness of dense retrieval models on both in-domain and zero-shot evaluations without introducing substantial training overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/castorini/dhr
Deep Fidelity in DNN Watermarking: A Study of Backdoor Watermarking for Classification Models
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Backdoor watermarking is a promising paradigm to protect the copyright of deep neural network (DNN) models. In the existing works on this subject, researchers have intensively focused on watermarking robustness, while the concept of fidelity, which is concerned with the preservation of the model's original functionality, has received less attention. In this paper, focusing on deep image classification models, we show that the existing shared notion of the sole measurement of learning accuracy is inadequate to characterize backdoor fidelity. Meanwhile, we show that the analogous concept of embedding distortion in multimedia watermarking, interpreted as the total weight loss (TWL) in DNN backdoor watermarking, is also problematic for fidelity measurement. To address this challenge, we propose the concept of deep fidelity, which states that the backdoor watermarked DNN model should preserve both the feature representation and decision boundary of the unwatermarked host model. To achieve deep fidelity, we propose two loss functions termed penultimate feature loss (PFL) and softmax probability-distribution loss (SPL) to preserve feature representation, while the decision boundary is preserved by the proposed fix last layer (FixLL) treatment, inspired by the recent discovery that deep learning with a fixed classifier causes no loss of learning accuracy. With the above designs, both embedding from scratch and fine-tuning strategies are implemented to evaluate the deep fidelity of backdoor embedding, whose advantages over the existing methods are verified via experiments using ResNet18 for MNIST and CIFAR-10 classifications, and wide residual network (i.e., WRN28_10) for CIFAR-100 task. PyTorch codes are available at https://github.com/ghua-ac/dnn_watermark.
MAFW: A Large-scale, Multi-modal, Compound Affective Database for Dynamic Facial Expression Recognition in the Wild
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Dynamic facial expression recognition (FER) databases provide important data support for affective computing and applications. However, most FER databases are annotated with several basic mutually exclusive emotional categories and contain only one modality, e.g., videos. The monotonous labels and modality cannot accurately imitate human emotions and fulfill applications in the real world. In this paper, we propose MAFW, a large-scale multi-modal compound affective database with 10,045 video-audio clips in the wild. Each clip is annotated with a compound emotional category and a couple of sentences that describe the subjects' affective behaviors in the clip. For the compound emotion annotation, each clip is categorized into one or more of the 11 widely-used emotions, i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, neutral, sadness, surprise, contempt, anxiety, helplessness, and disappointment. To ensure high quality of the labels, we filter out the unreliable annotations by an Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm, and then obtain 11 single-label emotion categories and 32 multi-label emotion categories. To the best of our knowledge, MAFW is the first in-the-wild multi-modal database annotated with compound emotion annotations and emotion-related captions. Additionally, we also propose a novel Transformer-based expression snippet feature learning method to recognize the compound emotions leveraging the expression-change relations among different emotions and modalities. Extensive experiments on MAFW database show the advantages of the proposed method over other state-of-the-art methods for both uni- and multi-modal FER. Our MAFW database is publicly available from https://mafw-database.github.io/MAFW.
Multilingual Coreference Resolution in Multiparty Dialogue
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

Existing multiparty dialogue datasets for entity coreference resolution are nascent, and many challenges are still unaddressed. We create a large-scale dataset, Multilingual Multiparty Coref (MMC), for this task based on TV transcripts. Due to the availability of gold-quality subtitles in multiple languages, we propose reusing the annotations to create silver coreference resolution data in other languages (Chinese and Farsi) via annotation projection. On the gold (English) data, off-the-shelf models perform relatively poorly on MMC, suggesting that MMC has broader coverage of multiparty coreference than prior datasets. On the silver data, we find success both using it for data augmentation and training from scratch, which effectively simulates the zero-shot cross-lingual setting.
A Multi-body Tracking Framework - From Rigid Objects to Kinematic Structures
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Kinematic structures are very common in the real world. They range from simple articulated objects to complex mechanical systems. However, despite their relevance, most model-based 3D tracking methods only consider rigid objects. To overcome this limitation, we propose a flexible framework that allows the extension of existing 6DoF algorithms to kinematic structures. Our approach focuses on methods that employ Newton-like optimization techniques, which are widely used in object tracking. The framework considers both tree-like and closed kinematic structures and allows a flexible configuration of joints and constraints. To project equations from individual rigid bodies to a multi-body system, Jacobians are used. For closed kinematic chains, a novel formulation that features Lagrange multipliers is developed. In a detailed mathematical proof, we show that our constraint formulation leads to an exact kinematic solution and converges in a single iteration. Based on the proposed framework, we extend ICG, which is a state-of-the-art rigid object tracking algorithm, to multi-body tracking. For the evaluation, we create a highly-realistic synthetic dataset that features a large number of sequences and various robots. Based on this dataset, we conduct a wide variety of experiments that demonstrate the excellent performance of the developed framework and our multi-body tracker.
Differentially Private Vertical Federated Clustering
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

In many applications, multiple parties have private data regarding the same set of users but on disjoint sets of attributes, and a server wants to leverage the data to train a model. To enable model learning while protecting the privacy of the data subjects, we need vertical federated learning (VFL) techniques, where the data parties share only information for training the model, instead of the private data. However, it is challenging to ensure that the shared information maintains privacy while learning accurate models. To the best of our knowledge, the algorithm proposed in this paper is the first practical solution for differentially private vertical federated k-means clustering, where the server can obtain a set of global centers with a provable differential privacy guarantee. Our algorithm assumes an untrusted central server that aggregates differentially private local centers and membership encodings from local data parties. It builds a weighted grid as the synopsis of the global dataset based on the received information. Final centers are generated by running any k-means algorithm on the weighted grid. Our approach for grid weight estimation uses a novel, light-weight, and differentially private set intersection cardinality estimation algorithm based on the Flajolet-Martin sketch. To improve the estimation accuracy in the setting with more than two data parties, we further propose a refined version of the weights estimation algorithm and a parameter tuning strategy to reduce the final k-means utility to be close to that in the central private setting. We provide theoretical utility analysis and experimental evaluation results for the cluster centers computed by our algorithm and show that our approach performs better both theoretically and empirically than the two baselines based on existing techniques.
Mary Kenneth Keller: First US PhD in Computer Science
Venue: arXiv cs.GL 2023
Year: 2023

In June 1965, Sister Mary Kenneth Keller, BVM, received the first US PhD in Computer Science, and this paper outlines her life and accomplishments. As a scholar, she has the distinction of being an early advocate of learning-by-example in artificial intelligence. Her main scholarly contribution was in shaping computer science education in high schools and small colleges. She was an evangelist for viewing the computer as a symbol manipulator, for providing computer literacy to everyone, and for the use of computers in service to humanity. She was far ahead of her time in working to ensure a place for women in technology and in eliminating barriers preventing their participation, such as poor access to education and daycare. She was a strong and spirited woman, a visionary in seeing how computers would revolutionize our lives. A condensation of this paper appeared as, ``The Legacy of Mary Kenneth Keller, First U.S. Ph.D. in Computer Science," Jennifer Head and Dianne P. O'Leary, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 45(1):55--63, January-March 2023.
Benchmarking zero-shot and few-shot approaches for tokenization, tagging, and dependency parsing of Tagalog text
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2023
Year: 2023

The grammatical analysis of texts in any written language typically involves a number of basic processing tasks, such as tokenization, morphological tagging, and dependency parsing. State-of-the-art systems can achieve high accuracy on these tasks for languages with large datasets, but yield poor results for languages which have little to no annotated data. To address this issue for the Tagalog language, we investigate the use of alternative language resources for creating task-specific models in the absence of dependency-annotated Tagalog data. We also explore the use of word embeddings and data augmentation to improve performance when only a small amount of annotated Tagalog data is available. We show that these zero-shot and few-shot approaches yield substantial improvements on grammatical analysis of both in-domain and out-of-domain Tagalog text compared to state-of-the-art supervised baselines.
Adversarial Camouflage for Node Injection Attack on Graphs
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

Node injection attacks on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention recently, due to their ability to degrade GNN performance with high attack success rates. However, our study indicates that these attacks often fail in practical scenarios, since defense/detection methods can easily identify and remove the injected nodes. To address this, we devote to camouflage node injection attack, making injected nodes appear normal and imperceptible to defense/detection methods. Unfortunately, the non-Euclidean structure of graph data and the lack of intuitive prior present great challenges to the formalization, implementation, and evaluation of camouflage. In this paper, we first propose and define camouflage as distribution similarity between ego networks of injected nodes and normal nodes. Then for implementation, we propose an adversarial CAmouflage framework for Node injection Attack, namely CANA, to improve attack performance under defense/detection methods in practical scenarios. A novel camouflage metric is further designed under the guide of distribution similarity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CANA can significantly improve the attack performance under defense/detection methods with higher camouflage or imperceptibility. This work urges us to raise awareness of the security vulnerabilities of GNNs in practical applications.
Multi-Bit Relaying over a Tandem of Channels
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

We study error exponents for the problem of relaying a message over a tandem of two channels sharing the same transition law, in particular moving beyond the 1-bit setting studied in recent related works. Our main results show that the 1-hop and 2-hop exponents coincide in both of the following settings: (i) the number of messages is fixed, and the channel law satisfies a condition called pairwise reversibility, or (ii) the channel is arbitrary, and a zero-rate limit is taken from above. In addition, we provide various extensions of our results that relax the assumptions of pairwise reversibility and/or the two channels having identical transition laws, and we provide an example for which the 2-hop exponent is strictly below the 1-hop exponent.
Large-scale Building Damage Assessment using a Novel Hierarchical Transformer Architecture on Satellite Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents \dahitra, a novel deep-learning model with hierarchical transformers to classify building damages based on satellite images in the aftermath of natural disasters. Satellite imagery provides real-time and high-coverage information and offers opportunities to inform large-scale post-disaster building damage assessment, which is critical for rapid emergency response. In this work, a novel transformer-based network is proposed for assessing building damage. This network leverages hierarchical spatial features of multiple resolutions and captures the temporal differences in the feature domain after applying a transformer encoder on the spatial features. The proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance when tested on a large-scale disaster damage dataset (xBD) for building localization and damage classification, as well as on LEVIR-CD dataset for change detection tasks. In addition, this work introduces a new high-resolution satellite imagery dataset, Ida-BD (related to 2021 Hurricane Ida in Louisiana in 2021) for domain adaptation. Further, it demonstrates an approach of using this dataset by adapting the model with limited fine-tuning and hence applying the model to newly damaged areas with scarce data.
Sequence Model Imitation Learning with Unobserved Contexts
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

We consider imitation learning problems where the learner's ability to mimic the expert increases throughout the course of an episode as more information is revealed. One example of this is when the expert has access to privileged information: while the learner might not be able to accurately reproduce expert behavior early on in an episode, by considering the entire history of states and actions, they might be able to eventually identify the hidden context and act as the expert would. We prove that on-policy imitation learning algorithms (with or without access to a queryable expert) are better equipped to handle these sorts of asymptotically realizable problems than off-policy methods. This is because on-policy algorithms provably learn to recover from their initially suboptimal actions, while off-policy methods treat their suboptimal past actions as though they came from the expert. This often manifests as a latching behavior: a naive repetition of past actions. We conduct experiments in a toy bandit domain that show that there exist sharp phase transitions of whether off-policy approaches are able to match expert performance asymptotically, in contrast to the uniformly good performance of on-policy approaches. We demonstrate that on several continuous control tasks, on-policy approaches are able to use history to identify the context while off-policy approaches actually perform worse when given access to history.
A Time Domain Volume Integral Equation Solver to Analyze Electromagnetic Scattering from Nonlinear Dielectric Objects
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2023
Year: 2023

A time domain electric field volume integral equation (TD-EFVIE) solver is proposed for analyzing electromagnetic scattering from dielectric objects with Kerr nonlinearity. The nonlinear constitutive relation that relates electric flux and electric field induced in the scatterer is used as an auxiliary equation that complements TD-EFVIE. The ordinary differential equation system that arises from TD-EFVIE's Schaubert-Wilton-Glisson (SWG)-based discretization is integrated in time using a predictor-corrector method for the unknown expansion coefficients of the electric field. Matrix systems that arise from the SWG-based discretization of the nonlinear constitutive relation and its inverse obtained using the Pade approximant are used to carry out explicit updates of the electric field and the electric flux expansion coefficients at the predictor and the corrector stages of the time integration method. The resulting explicit marching-on-in-time (MOT) scheme does not call for any Newton-like nonlinear solver and only requires solution of sparse and well-conditioned Gram matrix systems at every step. Numerical results show that the proposed explicit MOT-based TD-EFVIE solver is more accurate than the finite-difference time-domain method that is traditionally used for analyzing transient electromagnetic scattering from nonlinear objects.
Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention for Multilabel Remote Sensing Image Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Multi-Label Remote Sensing Image Classification (MLRSIC) has received increasing research interest. Taking the cooccurrence relationship of multiple labels as additional information helps to improve the performance of this task. Current methods focus on using it to constrain the final feature output of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). On the one hand, these methods do not make full use of label correlation to form feature representation. On the other hand, they increase the label noise sensitivity of the system, resulting in poor robustness. In this paper, a novel method called Semantic Interleaving Global Channel Attention (SIGNA) is proposed for MLRSIC. First, the label co-occurrence graph is obtained according to the statistical information of the data set. The label co-occurrence graph is used as the input of the Graph Neural Network (GNN) to generate optimal feature representations. Then, the semantic features and visual features are interleaved, to guide the feature expression of the image from the original feature space to the semantic feature space with embedded label relations. SIGNA triggers global attention of feature maps channels in a new semantic feature space to extract more important visual features. Multihead SIGNA based feature adaptive weighting networks are proposed to act on any layer of CNN in a plug-and-play manner. For remote sensing images, better classification performance can be achieved by inserting CNN into the shallow layer. We conduct extensive experimental comparisons on three data sets: UCM data set, AID data set, and DFC15 data set. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SIGNA achieves superior classification performance compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. It is worth mentioning that the codes of this paper will be open to the community for reproducibility research. Our codes are available at https://github.com/kyle-one/SIGNA.